


a material thing

by wreathed



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - 1930s, Anal Sex, Class Differences, Crossdressing, Felching, Gardens & Gardening, Jealousy, M/M, Resolved Sexual Tension, Summer, Water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:46:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27052144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: Francis is a Great War veteran working as a gardener at Rose Hill. James has returned to his childhood home to pay a visit to his brother. AnAtonement-inspired AU.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 28
Kudos: 76





	a material thing

The sun beats down hard on the whole garden, hiding nothing. There is the sound of crickets from the long grass by the stream and the refraction of the air wavering in the dry heat. No thunderstorm is gathering to break the lethargy of the day. 

A woozy house fly buzzes under Francis’s nose, then collapses onto his gardening glove. Francis sends it on its way with a sharp movement of his hand and sighs, perspiration prickling at his brow. He looks up from his work, squints into the middle distance towards the house and catches the sight of James, the ward of his employer, lazing across the middle of the main lawn. His arms, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, are thrown back, his loose trousers with the hems lifted to his knees reveal legs lolling ahead of him, all making a line of long limbs browning in the sun.

Francis tears his gaze from all of it and returns to his task of pruning a low-hanging branch on one of the pear trees that grow at Rose Hill.

Francis hadn’t always been a gardener attached to a fine English country house. His father had been a solicitor, yet Francis had insisted on joining the Navy. Having reached the rank of Commander then slogging his way through most of the Great War bodily unscathed, he would have been set for life had it not been for his discharge in the circumstances of the lowest disgrace and a resultant need to seek any sort of work he'd be accepted for.

He had kept his silence about who the man had been, even when threatened with field punishment, or worse. Captain Sir James Clark Ross still finds time to write to him on occasion, and has a wife and children whom he adores.

The Coninghams are kindly and liberal, and friends with many forward-thinking intellectuals, and had not enquired further as to Francis’s history once they had inferred something of his background. There was an affinity from Robert Coningham, originally a County Londonderry man, albeit without a trace of the accent to betray him. He understood Francis’s way of speaking did not mark him as lowborn, only provincial, when many others had got no further than comprehending Francis was Irish and knew something of the sea.

The cottage provided to Francis was a simple but homely one, and Francis had worked as hard as he could manage to and felt devastatingly alone, no company in the evenings beyond the bottle. Then the war ended, and Francis heard of so many fallen friends out of the men who he had left out on the North Sea — in the newspaper, or sometimes from wires or from passers-by if he went into the village — and he eventually found out with great relief that his best pal Blanky had returned alive, although maimed; one leg blown clean off during some madcap feat of rescue. Now safe in the north of the country with his family, they still write to each other often.

There are still good days and bad days for Francis’s drinking, and although today is one of the good ones, each of those days he had heard bad news were not.

The fly returns, completing a slow circle around the tree trunk before landing on the circle of wood freshly revealed by Francis’s pruning saw. Francis stares at it, fat as an inkspot, then looks up and away to watch James roll himself over to a face-down position, the sweep of his deeply unconventional hairstyle falling to reveal the nape of his neck, pinprick-sized from this distance away but nevertheless eye-catching from having been kept pale out of the sun, before pushing himself up to standing, face scrunched against the onslaught of the sun. Looking around, first to the fountain, then to where the land in the distance slopes upwards from the other side of the stream, he saunters back towards the house, taking the stone steps up to the terrace two at a time and disappearing through the flung-open French doors that open out from his bedroom. Francis has remained unnoticed.

There are rosebeds planted alongside that wing of the house with flowers that likely need deadheading. With a creak to his bones as he reaches down, Francis picks up his toolbag and makes for the rose garden.

The Coninghams have two sons, or, strictly speaking, a son and a ward they had taken in as a baby and, barring primogeniture, treated as their own. After a couple of years of Francis working here had passed by, the younger, William, had been sent away to Eton, illness-prone but trueborn; James, sometimes challenging, adored by Louisa and given the run of the house, was provided with private tutors at home, although without his brother to lark about with Francis had watched him (from some distance) falter devoid of peers and grow terribly bored. So bored that eventually he had turned to Francis with rambling insights and questions that Francis was obliged to listen to. James eventually showed himself to be an inquisitive if arrogant adolescent, asking Francis about plant genera and dreadnoughts in between opining his views of the world. Over time, once Francis was reasonably certain James wasn’t going to run crying to his mother over it, he would gruffly counter James’s more spurious arguments as ably as he could, and it was as if they could have become friends if they had met under more equal circumstances.

James had then already been too old to still be doing recitals, but they were Master Coningham’s favourite entertainment, especially when he was down for the school holidays and unwell enough to be bedbound as a precaution, and so the Coninghams continued to indulge James in his theatrical passions. James wrote jokes and stories and poems, he had told Francis, and performed each piece dressed up as a different person. Inevitably this had sometimes called for the hilarity of slapdash drag, much to William’s amusement.

Tonight there is to be a revival, just like old times: James has returned to visit because his brother is once again convalescing, and, Francis has heard from Louisa, James is to do a one-man vaudeville in several different disguises.

Lost in thought, Francis finds his feet have already carried him to the roses. He takes out his secateurs and kneels in the dry earth.

James got older and taller and more likely to challenge the veracity of Francis’s ad hoc teachings on the world, although he would typically deploy a winsome smile as he did so. Upon turning eighteen, he left for university. His going up to Trinity had left Francis with surprisingly heart-wrenching feelings of loss, once more working in peace with no-one to field to him some boast or ask him questions about this, that or the other. Each vac brought James back more insufferable, dressed in increasingly frivolous clothes and often accompanied by a new coterie of objectionable toffs: sportsman Gore and dandyish Le Vesconte, men who fawned over James and have no work to otherwise occupy their time.

Francis and James had for some time managed to engage in lively debate, but from what Francis can overhear Cambridge moulds James into a performative wit more practiced in rhetoric than ever. Beset with an accent and having become a sailor at the age of fourteen, Francis longed for something of James's formal education, but had by now come to the realisation that buried beneath his furious jealousy he longed for James himself far more.

On each trip home between terms, James further became the haughty well-respected man he was expected to become, and Francis sweltered in the gardener's cottage, utterly abandoned by James for his silly university friends of his own age and social standing, and Francis felt overwhelmed by want. He could have drowned in it.

James had been due a third, but managed to pull it up to a second at the last moment. Perhaps he had been having too much of a good time to have been expected to have done well on paper. Francis doesn’t like to think about that too much: the inquisitive and successful hands of bright young things.

After his graduation, James had visited Rose Hill for just long enough to prove to Francis he was fully grown, and ruinously enchanting with it — no university friends that time, being all away embarking on their chosen professions or reacquainting themselves with their estates — before he was to leave to make his fortune in London. No bureaucrat or holder of a birthright, he was not to follow his hardworking father into the Ministry, but had agreed to take up a position handling clients for a bank that would pay him very well.

On James’s last night before leaving for the City, he had deigned to bring himself to Francis’s lowly cottage, invite himself in and begin a new discussion with Francis without so much as an apology for having roundly ignored him for the past three years. Francis, full of whisky and humiliation, had demanded that he leave immediately, and James had fled without needing to be convinced at any further length.

Since then, they’ve had minimal interaction; more of an absence than a thawing. Yet still Francis finds himself watching James from afar drawl and joke with an angry split through his whole aching heart. At night, he is left with hazy dreams of James below him, how the steady curve to his lip might soften, and other impossible things he does not let himself linger on whenever awake.

Francis cuts away another dying flower. The doors to James’s bedroom are still open so that he sometimes hears excitable shouts between James and William slip through, but the heavy curtains are drawn from Francis’s eyes and the blazing afternoon. He hears James laugh with William, scurrying to and from different parts of the room and asking William what sort of things he should put on for the show. James has succumbed to the inevitability of reverting to a youthful sort of energy that happens whenever any established man well-loved by their family returns to their childhood home.

“If you want for fresh flowers, my dear brother, you shall have them!” James calls airily from within, amidst shared good-natured laughter, and moments later guilelessly strides out of the French doors holding a large antique vase prized by the family, mid-costume change: he is barefoot and wearing a dressing gown made out of Chinese silk, done up just about tightly enough to not be entirely indecent.

“With me,” James says without looking at Francis directly; dragged out of his festering reverie by James himself, Francis drops his secateurs on the flowerbed and paces to catch up to him. “You can advise me of the flowers I can have to put in here, please. Not these ones,” James says, meaning the nearby lines of pink and red roses.

“Ah, you’re speaking to me now, are you,” Francis says coolly, longing at least for acknowledgement of his presence, if he can have acknowledgement from James on nothing else.

“I speak to you,” James says, brow furrowed and voice tight from his mouth, as they walk at a fair clip side by side down the gentle slope of the lawn. _To let me know there will be guests about in the evening_ , Francis thinks in poor-tempered desperation. _To impart some banality about the weather._

“Take a few of the delphiniums up, if you insist on it. From the walled garden.” Francis braves a look directly to James’s face; his handsomeness is as if there is no imaginable reason for him to be unsure of his place in the world, wrought with newly deepening lines at his cheeks, and the heat has raised a slight gleam of sweat at his philtrum. The robe James is wearing shines in the sunlight, its fastidious and adventurous embroidery glinting, sometimes golden. Francis wonders what he could possibly have on underneath.

“You’ll need water,” Francis says as they reach the broad basin of the fountain. 

“Shame you can’t come tonight,” James says with the same suddenness as the abrupt stop of his long strides. He sits down at the fountain’s edge of pale grey stone warmed by the daylight, dark eyes meeting Francis’s for an instant before he turns to look down at the water. Tonight is a hark back play for the family. It is nothing for Francis at all.

“Yes,” Francis says without proper thought behind it, for from behind James he is watching his bare ankles flit in and out of the hem of his robe as his feet slide against the grass. James sits there like that in a sullen kind of meditation, holding the vase by one of its handles, as though he has forgotten his reason for being here. 

“Here, let me,” Francis sighs, reaching to take the vase just as James firmly declines any offer of assistance, and to Francis’s horror, tempered only by a rush of nervous excitement, their brief tussle results in the handle Francis holds breaking off and shattering into two against the stone, the larger half falling straight to the bottom of the fountain.

“Oh, you fool,” James says, voice low and throaty in its disapproval, regarding Francis with his brows knitted together in consternation. He twists himself around to peer at the water more closely, briefly baring to Francis the full line of his bare legs at the high split of his silk robe as he does so. “Do you realise that’s probably the most valuable thing they own?”

Francis raises an eyebrow, one corner of his mouth lifting. “No longer,” he dares, and James gapes back at him, quite pleasantly scandalised.

James rises, furious, feet back on the grass only long enough for Francis to remember the second broken shard of porcelain, the one that has fallen to the ground and points sharply upwards. “Watch yourself!” Francis calls out, eyes on the uncovered arch of James’s feet, and James startles and halts his forward step.

His mouth set in an aggrieved but determined sneer, James draws himself to his full height, forcefully meets Francis’s eyes and, as if he has been dared to do so, pulls apart the tie at the waist of his immaculate silk robe.

Francis is left to blink as if startled, mouth no longer dry, as James shrugs back the straight line of his shoulders until the fabric pools around his feet, far too expensive to ruin in the water. He has revealed a pale-coloured woman’s slip; an authentic base to a costume, Francis supposes. The hemline is dangerously short on his frame.

Standing tall and angular against the backdrop of the fountain’s central figure of Aphrodite, limbs entirely revealed to Francis in close proximity, James then sits once more at the fountain. His hand grips the edge of the basin as he turns himself away from Francis, paler skin up to the line of his hips revealing itself through the side slits of the slip as he does so.

Blood-hot, any daring amusement he had felt having long since faded, Francis watches James submerge the whole of himself into the water.

He waits for James’s reappearance with his breath held, watching the disturbance of the water that signals James’s absence. The last vestiges of his dignity and good sense have gone and sunk to the ocean’s floor, to the fountain’s basin.

His thumb presses with force into the curve of the fractured vase fragment he is still holding, tight as the feeling of sweat on his skin. He wants like a fever; something that depletes him.

James emerges standing in rush of water, stepping up onto the stone edge of the basin, hair plastered to his head and the broken vase handle clasped in his hand. The ivory slip has turned darker from its drenching: close to the same colour as James’s skin and clinging to every line of him. Water gathers, gleaming, at his collarbone, and Francis can see the dark peak of his nipples, the jut of his hipbones. A hazy hint of the shape of his prick shows through where the skirt of the slip cleaves to the curve of his thighs.

James looks down to Francis’s gaze with his mouth parted, his eyes falling to Francis’s throat when he swallows. A man altogether, furnished with a fresh awareness. Only when James sways his head aside to look away does Francis shamefully avert his eyes.

Colour high in his cheeks, James hastily bundles the dressing gown back around himself, and Francis is left with no choice but to grit his teeth and allow James’s conceited reconstruction of himself to happen in front of him. Cradling the broken vase, James stalks off to return to the house, snatching the vase fragment Francis has been restlessly tracing over with his thumb as he passes. They run close enough to each other for Francis to be able to feel how James has been cooled by the water, but their hands don’t touch. Light as the legs of a dragonfly meeting water tension. Francis is left to pick up the final piece.

*

Francis stands outside his gardener’s cottage in the airless night, there having been little abatement to the daytime heat, cigarette lit and cradled between two fingers. From here, he looks over Rose Hill’s whole domain — the meadow, the stream, the walled flower garden, the fountain that scant hours ago had yielded to him a torrid urgency that refuses to leave him — all the way up to the main house.

Even from this distance, it is as clear to Francis as a lighthouse: the single storey protrusion of James’s bedroom, apart from the others in the house’s newer wing, the curtains left open, bright with the glow of a single lamp having been left on when the rest of the house at this late hour is in complete darkness. The Coninghams’ celebration has ended. In rebuke to its revelry, Francis has left his supply of whisky untouched.

Francis, still in his work clothes of waistcoat and shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and having been unable to settle into anything since the afternoon, elects to take his cigarette for a walk.

It’s the dead of night, but there’s no land Francis knows better. He reaches James’s terrace with a swiftness and inevitability that feels like the travel of dream logic, and with the same inevitability James is there waiting, leaning elegantly against the frame of the open French doors. He is outfitted in a skilfully tailored suit and has a cigarette of his own. He has done something to his hair, Francis realises through their combined tobacco smoke; something so that it curls more so than it usually does.

“Awfully sorry you couldn't come and see the show,” James says. “Would you like to see what I wore for it?”

“Very much,” Francis admits, mouth dry and fumbling, not wanting his agreement to sound irrevocably loud when thrown out into the night-time silence. He doesn’t trust his voice not to give out entirely as he follows James out of the garden and into his bedroom, closing the door on the sweet-smelling rows of roses. The curtains remain open to the empty lawn.

He watches James walk ahead of him, a slim dark-clothed column. James finds an ashtray on a cabinet top crowded with trinkets and stubs out his cigarette. As Francis follows suit, James picks up something from the cabinet and then disappears behind the Victorian scrap screen he typically uses for changing behind during his little shows.

There is a rattan chair to the side of the bookcase, which is filled with a combination of leatherbound editions that predate James’s birth and looseleaf pages of James’s poetical juvenilia. Francis seats himself there and looks to the screen behind which James is dressing for performance, or so that is the pretence.

Francis cannot glimpse James himself, not even an outline, but he does see his suit being draped over the top of the screen, piece by piece, each part coming away with an efficient rustle of removal which tightens the hot knot of need in the pit of Francis’s stomach: jacket, waistcoat, necktie, crisp shirt and its collar, sleeveless undershirt. The trousers are not added to the row of clothes over the top of the screen, but Francis hears them fall to the floor, both the slump of the fabric and the clink of the belt buckle. He waits and waits in the low lamplight.

James reveals himself adorned in a hastily-applied smudge of lipstick and an exquisite green gown Francis will remember forever.

It’s low enough at the front to bare the whole breadth of James’s collarbone and some of his chest, with fine enough straps to be near-lost to the curve of his shoulders. A horizontal band of fabric clings sensationally to his hips. No shoes, because it's meant for temporary use and the hasty changes of performance. Not for going out in, not meant to last. Hence there is the froth of the floor-length hem, and then bare feet once more.

“Do you like it?” James asks, voice rough. There is a tremor to his athletic forearms, held open and apart to show himself off. “I borrowed it from,” — he swallows, mid-sentence – “a friend.”

The thought of another living soul seeing James as he is now rouses a jealously in Francis that is only enriched by Francis’s first sight of the back of the dress as James turns to fuss with something he has placed on the crowded dressing table cabinet top beside the bookshelf: it dips very low, low enough to meet the narrowest part of his back. So much bared skin at such close quarters that Francis has imagined under his hands for so long, and they are entirely alone.

“It’s yours so far as I’m concerned, James; you've earned the right to it. Who else could possibly wear it better?”

“Well,” James says, clipped but clearly pleased. Francis drags his eyes up to James’s face, looking up at him from where he is seated in the chair. Still untouched but moving inexorably towards the notion that he will remain that way all night, Francis is only half-managing to hide under the studied lean of his forearm the insistent ache of his desire, leaving him pinned in place to the chair out of propriety and shame. 

“You’ll do,” says Francis gruffly. “Oh, you know you look well,” he then snaps, and when James only blinks back at him he steels himself to be more forthright. “I think you look beautiful”, Francis says, and smiles when James does so: a treat, a giddy smile without self-consciousness. Francis is an aging man, any once-held position of significance long since lost in dishonour, and he desires James whatever he wears; nothing can beat it out of him. The dress is too bare at the back and shoulders, Francis realises, to be worn with the wet slip he saw in the sun. What _is_ being worn underneath is a fresh facet of obsession to join all the others he already holds, and now Francis can think of little else but what he can do to find out.

“I thought this might make it easier,” James says around another swallow. He presses his lips together as though he does not realise he is doing it, then parts them infinitesimally, and Francis watches it all openly in the way he is typically used to doing in secret. “For you to close your eyes and kiss me.”

“You fool. I’d have you in anything or nothing.” The words slip out, so unlikely it is in Francis’s head that James could ever think himself inferior to any other options. Francis stands, expression tightened so as to prepare in case of rejection, hoping his trousers are loose enough to conceal his straining blood-hot prick. As if to encourage appropriate behaviour, Francis keeps his gaze trained on James’s face. James is like no-one Francis has ever met before, least of all any woman he has found. James knows nothing of what is easy for Francis and what is difficult. They stand close together now, not touching, although Francis is near enough to feel each disturbance James’s hitched breathing makes on the world.

After such a long time of holding back and all the distance that has been between them in the past, Francis finds that, despite his desperation, he cannot let go of his fears enough to touch him.

“I wore a wrap over my shoulders for the recital,” James tells Francis, some of the usual haughty punch gone out of his voice, as if sharing in a conspiracy; he now sounds a little more determinedly coy. His eyes are delicate, dark and tempting, and alert to Francis’s scrutiny. “But I wanted you to have the full effect.”

“Well. Thank you.” Francis feels his pulse quicken; as he contemplates just how yielding James under his touch in this room could be, he places one of his hands into his trouser pocket so as to the hide the tremble that has beset him. “Consider me affected.”

“Nor was I in this state, of course,” James laughs awkwardly, head tipped down towards his own belly, and Francis at last lets himself look to where James is ruining the line of the gown with an unmistakable and ruinous erection. “Only for you today am I so indecent, do not fear. You must forgive me.”

“None of that,” Francis says. He can’t reveal how he wants the whole world to see James as he is but also to keep James only for himself, in all its apparent contradiction; it’s not his place. His mind is too clouded, arousal too far in his blood, for him to think clearly: how on earth could James want him? Even to satiate a provisional need, the idea is improbable. “No forgiveness is needed here.”

“Francis. What further permission are you waiting for?” James asks, sharp in the warm room, for the moment sounding as he should do from master to servant. Francis’s heart jumps. He manages to reach to James’s bare forearm, the dusting of hair there soft under the pads of his fingertips.

It’s no distance between them now, no distance at all. With a creak of his elbow, Francis’s hands are at where James's cock is hardening beneath his silk. Francis’s touch goes straight to it, the fabric fine enough for him to feel the heat there. Nothing on underneath. There’s his answer. Nothing on underneath. 

“You're not to ruin the dress,” James tells him, his authority undercut via by his latest breath being partway to a gasp, but Francis has the shake of James’s thighs under his palms now, and any other concerns of his have disappeared.

“I'm to ruin you,” Francis tells him, James's flush rising across his skin, the whole heat of James’s prick still cradled in Francis’s hand through the silk. “I'm to put this sickness you gave me into you. Come here for it.”

Francis pushes James sidelong into the nearest wall, which transpires to be a bookcase, bared throat right at Francis’s eyeline, and takes James’s mouth in his. Francis holds James’s jaw in his hand to draw James closer, keep him pinned, and their hot mouths do not leave one another’s for some time. James’s hands eventually move from their veering unsure position at his sides to where Francis’s shirt bunches up at the back line of his waistcoat. Francis presses a palm against James’s chest to keep him where he is, and they have each other’s mouths again. There is an obscene pressing together through their clothes: Francis trapped in more practical, thicker fabrics, James with a barely-concealed bulge beneath his close-fit silk, the slightest bleed of a dark circle forming where James has leaked against the fabric.

Teeth worrying his bottom lip, determined, James looks down at Francis and roughly grabs for the fastening of his trousers, tearing them open for himself and then undoing the bottom two buttons of Francis’s shirttails, pawing at what he finds beneath. “God,” James says quietly, his hand squeezing the full weight of Francis’s cock, making Francis moan. “God, let me have it.”

Francis grasps James tightly around his upper arms and turns him around, James’s hands grasping at one of the bookshelves, and Francis takes in the full view of his back in the dress. Perfect, perfect. A hand of Francis’s lingering there for a moment, then, over the silk-covered curve of his backside.

Then Francis slowly lifts up the skirt of James’s dress, like the raising of a music hall curtain.

“Oh, you’re a lovely thing,” Francis murmurs into the heat of the back of James’s neck once he has pushed all the fabric of the skirt aside, his other hand flat against the pleasing shake of James’s legs. “You’re your own thing.”

James, it seems, has been reduced to keening whines, clinging on for dear life to the second-highest shelf, legs apart, forehead and cock pressed flush against two particularly broad-spined classical tomes. Francis takes in once more what he has here: the nape of James’s neck, his pleading. Francis holds his stiff cock against the swell of James’s bare behind and makes one thrust against the space there, and then James tells him there is a tin of Vaseline on the makeshift makeup table next to them, an accoutrement of the theatrical.

Francis coats his thumb in it and gets it into James quick, and James slams himself against the bookshelf, clenching around Francis. Francis gets his first two fingers slick as well and moves to those instead, keeping a gentle curve to them, and James sweats and swears, muscles firm at the top of his legs where the dress is swept aside. Francis listens to the noises that come out of him, the _Francis, please_ that falls from his mouth like a prayer, then decides to wait no longer.

Feeling himself close, Francis slicks up his own cock with only one pull of his hand before pushing straight into James, guiding himself in with his own hand until he’s in tight close to the hilt. Positioned inside the heat of him, Francis places the hand not holding the dress aside at the curve of James’s lower back, fingertips against his febrile skin, and they stay together, unmoving, catching their breath, Francis’s exhales meeting James’s hairline.

“Please. Harder,” James says around the rumble of his breath. “Make me remember it.”

Hand grasping tight against James, Francis fucks into him again, and Francis is taken with the slap of their bodies joining together, the indecent arch of James’s foot against the carpet.

He can and will make James remember it, remember him, but does James know this doesn’t have to be the only time? Francis has said: he would have him in anything or nothing.

As bid, Francis does not abate: he fucks James over and over, teetering towards his own end, holding James up, the thump of the bookshelf and their bodies marking their rhythm; Francis bites as he goes at all the bared skin he can reach, from nape to lower back. There’ll be redness and bruises, enough so as for it to be indecent for James to wear this dress for another any time soon.

Where James, spread out, is grasping onto the bookshelf, Francis places his hand over James’s hand, fingers encircling his wrist.

“I’ll kiss your cunt,” Francis tells the lovely shell of James’s ear as James’s knuckles turn white from holding himself upright. Francis has dreamed of it and now he wants to make it a promise, wants James to hear the hard edges of his words and know the level of longing Francis has found himself in. “I’ll kiss your sweet wet cunt until I’m satisfied.”

James gasps, babbling desperate nonsense, and Francis spends as deep as he can go with a soft groan. He has been sated but it has not helped his ruined mind at all, and he does not simply wish to roll over and slumber, he wants to give James every pleasure he can and keep his body and mind in his grasp.

“Let me look at you,” Francis says, and James turns around to face him, wild-eyed and weak-kneed, hair messed and his own ignored cock damp with precome; his face is flushed, there is sweat at his hairline, and some of the colour of his lipstick has gone away and bled to one side of his face. Despite being spent, Francis feels a fresh wave of overwhelming desire.

One sweaty strand of his own hair having fallen forwards over his face, aware that he is still entirely clothed, Francis, self-conscious, pulls up his underwear over his messy softening cock but removes his boots and trousers, James watching him with interest. Francis pushes his hair back and looks up to James pulling on himself, leaning against the bookshelf with an coquettish expression.

“You’re not going to leave me in this state, are you?” James asks, eyeing the discarded trousers and boots that are telling him the answer.

“Look at you,” Francis breathes in wonder, eyes only for the ardently ruined state of James in front of him. “Look at you. Let’s get you cleaned up for another go, hm?”

Taking James’s arm in his, Francis helps him stagger towards the bed, James daintily gathering up the fabric of the dress’s skirt and holding it aside and away from the mess of him. He lies lengthways across the bed, face down, legs spread, and Francis kneels at the floor behind him.

Some of Francis’s spend has already come out of James and trailed down his thigh, and Francis traces his finger through it, making James quiver and squirm. Then Francis spits into James’s hole, still open and eager, and lowers his mouth, tongue curling around his own spend, pressing against the viscosity of it before slurping the mess out of him, close to overflowing with what Francis has filled it up with. James’s surprised moans soon turn to pleading ones, in part muffled by the bedsheets. Francis feels the shudder of the bedframe, the moment that James thrusts his trapped cock against the mattress.

Francis can take all his spend out of him but James’s innocence cannot be returned. It is not that Francis would credulously believe that this is James’s first ever experience, but this is not the same as a furtive meeting with a same-aged peer on equal footing. Francis’s place in this house and how he feels about James: that is the violation.

His own cock unable to rise again so quickly, Francis lets his fingers join his mouth, and together with the friction against James’s cock he brings him off just from that, James panting happily into the floral coverlet that he has left in no fit state.

“I’ve got you,” Francis tells James, fingers deep inside him still, down on the ground by the firm muscles at the back of James’s legs. “I’ve got you.”

Francis hides the ache he feels as he gets up from his knees. He does not want to reveal to James what labouring or soldiering does to a man, not when James moves with the easy, gangling grace of a neophyte scholar.

“Unzip me,” James breathes, decadently at rest across the bed, his hand curving at the end of his dangling arm. “And for God’s sake Francis, undress the rest of yourself.” 

It seems that James, even now satisfied, does not yet want Francis gone.

*

“Your father says there’s going to be a war.”

Francis feels the low lazy hum of James’s assent against the muscle of his shoulder; James is folded, sweaty and heated and naked, tightly into Francis’s arms. One of Francis’s hands lazily combs through James’s loose hair as both of them lie snug together under the lightest available of James’s copious blankets.

“I was dragged into Stanfords by Charlewood not two weeks ago,” James murmurs. “Latest world atlases all fitted with hasty inserts of the Austria annexation. I suspect that won’t be the end of it, and I suppose my father would know more than most.”

“I can’t bear it all happening again,” Francis says softly against James’s forehead. There’s no-one else he’ll confess it to.

“Well, I'll be joining up, I suppose, whenever it comes. Can hardly have anyone call me a coward, and I know too many people think me a damnable fop. I was thinking of volunteering for the Navy, like you.”

Francis lets James’s hair flow out of his fingers. It would have to be cut short.

“You'd make a fine lad on one of those great ships,” Francis tells him. How is it that as soon as he has James they were discussing Francis having to let him go? “You'll be strapping.”

James’s proud smile against Francis’s chest briefly sparks Francis’s own grin, unseen in the darkness of the room.

“Very kind of you to call me strapping after seeing me in that get-up,” James says in a happy drawl. “I’ll sort them all out, you’ll see. There’ll be no need for Chamberlain to lift a finger.”

“Don't jest about it,” Francis tells him sharply, and James falls silent once more. “You could die. You could drown.”

If James were a woman, Francis would gift her a cigarette holder or some other token of his esteem and apology, resign from his position and never touch her again. James knows nothing of what is easy for Francis and what is difficult.

Head buried into Francis’s embrace, Francis feels against his skin the prickling flutter of James’s eyelashes. Francis will not have it happen again, he resolves, not with this James; he will not be sent away by anyone, least of all himself, mouth all sewn up with secrets.

“Perhaps you could join up with me?” James ventures sweetly, for a moment sounding years younger than he is.

“I’m far too old,” Francis says in a tone of amused disbelief. It’s the reason he can voice aloud. “They wouldn’t have me.”

What a dupe he is for thinking himself clean out of it, out of waiting for the man he loves to safely return from battle, only now he doesn’t have his own military duties to distract him from his worry. Then again, it’s laughable to think a war is the only thing that might stand between them.

Francis tightens his embrace as James signs happily and languidly against him and lets his eyes close. He prays he will awaken tomorrow with the courage to beg James to give up his gilded London life and return here for a clandestine one for as long as they have time, and falls asleep to a premonition of a whitewashed cottage by the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> Please come and say hello on [tumblr](https://wreathedwith.tumblr.com/post/632176989987569664/a-material-thing-wreathed-the-terror-tv-2018)! (Message me on tumblr if you're on Terror Twitter and would like to follow me there.)
> 
>  _Edited to add, 22/11/2020_ : I have now written a pretentious note on the ending of this fic, which can be found on [tumblr](https://wreathedwith.tumblr.com/post/635466312032911360/a-material-thing-wreathed-the-terror-tv-2018).


End file.
